Clear enough. I was to be a mutt with no balls and just my master’s collar to let people know I had the right to piss on his flowers. But I fixed a smile to my face and, brushing some stars and stripes onto my words, piped, “Yes, sir, I understand you perfectly.”

When I got back home, Diana was waiting for me, full of excited questions.

“Well?” she said. “What happened?”

“He makes a terrible martini,” I said. “That’s what happened.”

“You had drinks with him?”

“Just the two of us. As if he was Nick and I was Nora Charles.”

“What was it like?”

“Too much gin. And way too cold. Like a country house party in England.”

“I meant, what did you talk about?”

“Among other things, philosophy.”

“Philosophy?” Diana pulled a face, and sat down. Already she was looking less excited. “That’s easier on the stomach than sleeping pills, I guess.”

Diana Vandervelden was rich, loud, glamorous, and drily funny in a way that always put me in mind of one of Hollywood’s tougher leading ladies, say Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. Formidably intelligent, she was easily bored and had given up a place at Bryn Mawr to play women’s golf, almost winning the U.S. Women’s Amateur title in 1936. The year after that she had quit competition golf to marry a senator. “When I met my husband it was love at first sight,” she was fond of saying. “But that’s because I was too cheap to buy glasses.” Diana was herself not very political, preferring writers and artists to senators, and, despite her many accomplishments in the salon-she was an excellent cook and was famous for giving some of the best dinner parties in Washington-she had quickly tired of being married to her lawyer husband: “I was always cooking for his Republican friends,” she later complained to me.